Aphorisms from the Professor: Brillat-Savarin

Friday, January 14, 2011

See, I told you we'd be back. And after eating out for almost 2 weeks straight, my boyfriend and I are just itching to get back to our kitchen and home-cooked meals (not to mention vegetables, which we never seem to get enough of when we eat out). Not that we can really complain: if you have to constantly eat out, New York is the place to be. Everything we have put in our mouths (running the full gamut from street food to fancy food) has been The Best.

We finally got our first big grocery shop out of the way this morning, and almost immediately my boyfriend got to it. I was thinking it would just be nice to have eggs and toast. But my boyfriend clearly had some creative energy stocked up, and we ended up with beautiful crepes.

The photo set-up still needs some sorting out because, as you can probably imagine, in New York we do not have the space for a permanent photo studio with fancy lights and a tripod like I had in Nashville - thank goodness for autolevels in Photoshop! But, our kitchen is amazing, which is clearly more important...for now...

Crepe with plum tomatoes, spinach, prosciutto, Spanish cheese (can't remember the name, just know that it is NOT Manchego.....) and a perfectly poached egg

I agree that NY is the place to be if you want to run the gamut of all the different food types. So glad to hear that your new place has a great kitchen - that is the one requirement of mine for any future abodes.

It is Restaurant Week here in Nashville, so Tony and I are finally going to try out Watermark tonight! It's 3 courses for $30.11, and I just couldn't pass up the opportunity.

About Us

My boyfriend loves to cook and is very creative in the kitchen. Although the internet is often consulted, he doesn't use recipes. He does most (ok, just about all) of the "heavy lifting" documented here. He also happens to be an amazing artist - which may contribute to his excellent food plating and presentation - so check out his art store on Etsy (and see some samples at the bottom of the page).

I perform important tasks (mainly peeling and chopping onions) and provide ideas gleaned from hours of reading food blogs, recipes and menus online, as well as gentle suggestions (i.e. "Isn't the [ingredient] going to go bad soon? Maybe we should use [ingredient] tonight..."). I am also Head Photographer and Blogmaster.

About Our Blog

In an article in the New York TimesMichael Pollan said that we spend more time watching "sport" cooking shows than we do actually cooking. And he said this like it is a bad thing. We hope that this blog proves that these shows, while not explicitly instructive, can be a wonderful inspiration.

Of course no one has the time or resources to cook like an Iron Chef all the time. Sometimes we decide to be adventurous and try more elaborate dishes, but generally we want to show that it isn't difficult to put together interesting, creative, and healthy meals any night of the week. We don't make a weekly plan, we don't decide what to make and then go get ingredients. We buy random fun and interesting things that catch our eye at the grocery store, and then figure out how we can use them.

So don't look here for recipes (for the most part the description of what we ate is all there is to it - "mashed turnip with horseradish" is mashed turnip with horseradish!), look here for everyday ideas and inspiration.